Suttree(31)

He heard voices rising louder. Hoghead’s high cackling laugh.

Here Sut.

He looked down. He was holding a jellyjar of white whiskey. He raised it and sipped.

I like the hell out of old Suttree, John Clancy said.

He was sitting on the lumpy arm of a stuffed chair. Something was under discussion. A slatshaped negress bent to look at him. He too drunk, she said.

Suttree lifted his glass in mute agreement but she had gone.

Someone rose from the chair. He must have been leaning against them because now he fell into the depths they had vacated, spilling the whiskey on himself. His face lay wedged in a rank corner of the upholstery.

He muttered into the musty springs.

Someone was helping him. He rose from a dream, a ragestrangled face screaming at him. He reeled toward the door. In the corridor he turned and made his way along to the rear of the house, caroming from wall to wall. A black woman stepped from out of the woodwork and came toward him. They feinted. She passed. He clattered into a bureau and fell back and went on. At the rear of the hallway he floundered through a curtain and stood in a small room. Somewhere before him in the dark people were breeding with rhythmic grunts. He backed out. He pulled at a doorknob. His gorge gave way and the foul liquors in his stomach welled and spewed. He tried to catch it in his hands.

God, he said. He was wiping himself on a curtain. He found a door and entered and collapsed in the cool dark. There was a bed there and he tried to crawl under it. It was important that he not be found until he’d had time to rest.

In his stupor he dreamed riots. A window full of glass somewhere collapsed in a crash. He thought he’d heard pistolshots. He struggled to wake but could not. He let his cheek go to a fresh spot on the floor where it was cooler and he slept again.

A dream of shriving came to him. He knelt on the cold stone flags at a chancel gate where the winey light of votive candles cast his querulous shadow behind him. He bent in tears until his forehead touched the stone.

When he woke his head was encoiled by some rank stench. A dull plaque of vomit furred his tongue. Dark faces bent between himself and the dusty bulb burning in the ceiling. Hey boy, hey boy, a voice was saying. He felt himself being jostled from side to side. He closed his eyes. Must ride out this hard weather.

I caint have it. Get him out of here.

He was hauled abruptly erect by his armpits. He looked down. Black hands cupped his chest. Ab? he said. Ab?

She bent to see into his face. Dull moteblown eyeballs webbed with blood. Wheah you buddies at? Hah?

You caint get no sense out of him.

He watched his heels dragging over the linoleum’s faded garden.

I see that little white pointedheaded motherfucker he come in with I goin to salivate his ass with a motherfuckin shotgun.

Where are we going?

What he say?

Can you walk? Hey boy.

He caint shit. Get him on out of here.

White motherfucker done puked everwhere.

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.

A warm splatter broke across his face, his chest. He twisted his head away, waving one hand. He was wet and he stank. He opened his eyes. A black hand was putting away a limber hosepipe, buttoning, turning. An enormous figure toppled away down the sky toward the mauve and glaucous dawn of the streetlamps.

Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me.

I’d like these shoes soled I dreamt I dreamt. An old bent cobbler looked up from his lasts and lapstone with eyes dim and windowed. Not these, my boy, they are far too far gone, these soles. But I’ve no others. The old man shook his head. You must forget these and find others now.

Suttree groaned. A switchengine shunted cars in a distant yard, telescoping them in crescendo coupling by coupling to an iron thunder that rattled sashwork all down McAnally Flats. By this clangorous fanfare dull shapes with sidling eyes and pale green teeth congealed with menace out of the dark of the hemisphere. A curtain fell, unspooling in a shock of dust and beetlehusks and dried mousedirt. Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarfs or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. Not dread but only homologues of dread. They bore a dead child in a glass bier. Sinister abscission, did I see with my seed eyes his thin blue shape lifeless in the world before me? Who comes in dreams, mansized at times and how so? Do shades nurture? As I have seen my image twinned and blown in the smoked glass of a blind man’s spectacles I am, I am.